


this is my final fit, my final bellyache

by r1ker



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-05 23:44:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1836505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/r1ker/pseuds/r1ker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the very beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this is my final fit, my final bellyache

He's born in January, one of the bleakest months in the whole state of Alaska.

The skies are grey, sunlight's only a limited three hours out of the day. It's blisteringly cold, as always, but even more so in dead winter. Inescapable is the stinging wind, flying through the pores and crevices of the jackets and scarves and hats and mittens that adorn the bodies of the brave who journey out from their homes. 

His father will tell him for the majority of his childhood that Will just "couldn't wait three more weeks to be born," arriving early before his anticipated time. Kyle will tell his son that his wife and Will's mother had labored just a brief seven hours before bringing the couple's first child into the world. For being early, the newborn is right on time with his development, weighing in at exactly six pounds. But at first glance, Kyle does not fall in love with his son. For hearing about this entity who attached itself to his wife's womb and grew for eight months and now seeing it in the flesh, the whole event brought on a sudden sense of panic that wasn't normally what new fatherhood was made of. It was an irrational, unending sense of impending doom, that with any wrong move comes the end of the being his wife has charmingly named William Thomas. Betty dresses the child in vintage clothing flown in from her mother's home in Nebraska, old smelling gowns and boots and jumpsuits that highlight the baby's very Betty-like appearance, with wispy brown hair and a round, chubby face. He's Betty's perfect doll for the first two years of his life, a baby who grows into a toddler who takes his family's cabin in the wilderness by storm with his infantile curiosity, laying his hands and feet on anything that came into his reach or view. Everything is fine for the new family's first years, for the time spent taking a gargantuan amount of pictures of their new child and their new life. 

All of this changes when Betty gets a cough she can't shake. 

 

Its symptoms present as the common cold but escalates into much more with bouts of bloody show in the woman's cough. Doctors come by the family's home and prescribe Betty the basic remedies of rest, soup, and diphenhydramine. One night, Kyle takes her into town on a particularly bad spell that doesn't end until she's placed on a nasal cannula, something they take home with them and keep until hear death.

Kyle starts keeping Will away from his mother in short bursts, to guard his son against the mysterious illness neither of them knows anything about.  When the child cries out for his mother, a wail that shakes Kyle to his very core with pain for his child and himself, he takes him by the master bedroom, where Betty has taken up convalescence. He sits Will on the bed for a short time, letting his son watch his mother braid her hair and read large tomes of medieval tales. One book Betty reads, to Will's rapt two-year-old attention, is about an early American president, John Adams. Will soaks in her gently spoken words like a sponge, enjoying the history of a man who defended the soldiers of the British Rebellion and subsequently became one region's leader. Betty starts to deteriorate quickly after the fall ends, losing the weight that had once softened her soft features and the ability to breathe without a shaking wheeze. 

In a way, Kyle is happy when Betty breathes her last one, watching his wife drift off with their hands on top of one another on the bedsheets. When she finally drifts off, he starts to sob, heavy, chest-shaking motions that take him from his crouch beside the bed to the floor, curled in on himself, trying to escape this. He's hit with a sudden sense of gaping loneliness, a feeling that hits him like a freight train, engulfing him until there is no more. The only thing is left is the child asleep in his crib in the next room, resting in close proximity to his dead mother.

That night, when they take her body away, his two brothers hold him back to keep from clinging to her body as it lies on the stretcher (Mark and Jacob tell Will in his adulthood, _your father screamed as if we were taking him away to battle to die_ ), covered in dark green polyester. His mother holds Will, who's wrapped in a blanket with his pacifier dangling out of his mouth with no knowledge of the end of his world.

Sleep doesn't come easily to Kyle after this. 

 

Kyle takes up solace after Will's lightly celebrated third birthday, retiring mostly to his bedroom at night with a glass of brandy in one hand and a newspaper in the other, keeping up on the world around him as he takes no active part in it. Will bounces around from home to home in the throes of Kyle's grief, staying at his uncles' homes for weekends and his grandmother's during the week, when Kyle isn't working his desk job at Starfleet (a gift from the higher ups after the death of his spouse). Time ticks by slowly, the three-year-old Will going to four and then to five, and all of a sudden, starting at the local elementary school. Will's first day of school is certainly pomp and circumstance for the newest member of Sebastian's Cove School, kicked off with a new uniform and a brand new lunch box. Kyle stays with his mother on the night before his son's first day of school, enjoying a saccharine sweet cartoon loop on one of the local channels with his boy. Kyle's heart stings when Will laughs at the jovial mishaps of the characters, a light and mirthful sound that reminds him of Betty's. Everything about his son - his way of saying, "Daddy, you make no sense sometimes," his moments of precious attitude with hands on his hips, the curl of his dark hair - reminds him so much of her. 

Kyle starts telling Will stories about Betty, speaking of the time the couple met at Starfleet in a Stellar Cartography intro course. Their fleeting and quick romance that blossomed into a move-in, an engagement, a wedding. They were first in Anchorage, living life in a tight apartment that gave them horrible bills and drafty surroundings. They moved down to Juneau two years before Will's birth and their wedding. Building a home in Juneau with their love, the couple coexisted and parented and loved until the very end.

He almost repressed the memory of being called into his son's school, being told, "Mr. Riker, he keeps speaking of his mother, and given the fact that you noted her death in his file, we believe this is an unhealthy behavior that your son cannot keep performing among his classmates." They look concerned for the child and forgiving for the father, a desperate sense of pity Kyle ignores. He tells them he'll talk to his son when the boy gets home from school. 

The sound of Will's cries echo through the house the whole night, and Kyle tries fruitlessly to console his child, kneeling to the boy's height with a comforting hand on his small shoulder. Will screams through the night, denying sleep and water when his father offers it to him. Will lies on his bed, crying an unintelligible _Mommy!_  to the ceiling until finally exhaustion overcomes him. 

 

Thus begins a restless childhood and adolescence for Will Riker, a time spent doubting his very existence and the words of his father, not knowing if the man was withholding everything Will needed to know about himself. Kyle leaves one night when Will is fifteen and he doesn't come back. Will goes through school with unresolved social troubles, gaining a friend then losing them to the hustle and bustle of school and assignments and after-school jobs and _I can't come over, I've got this thing tonight and I just can't miss it_. Will loses his father to the far away callings of space, learning of his father's deep space assignment through a briefly worded letter.

Until the elder Riker's assignment to the Enterprise in Will's adulthood, Will heard, saw, or knew nothing of his father's life. 

**Author's Note:**

> mmmmmmeeeeeeehhhhhhhh. i'll be back w/ more plot bunnies soon.


End file.
